Location-acquisition technologies collect huge volumes of spatiotemporal data in servers, databases, and cloud computing. The location-acquisition technologies use global positioning system (GPS), global system for mobile communications (GSM), Wi-Fi, etc. to enable collecting spatiotemporal data (space and time qualities) of location histories of where people visited and times of visits. The increasing availability of the spatiotemporal data has provided information in multiple ways. For instance, a large number of service vehicles transport passengers to and from various locations. Some service vehicles may be equipped with sensors to record their spatiotemporal data to a centralized server at regular intervals. The sensors may collect the spatiotemporal data in log books, which identify the locations where the service vehicles travelled with the passengers and times of travel.
However, a challenge includes trying to understand unusual spatiotemporal data of the service vehicles. Additional challenges include sparseness of the data for some roads travelled on and distribution skewness of the data for traffic travelled on different roads. Thus, there are opportunities using innovative technologies to analyze the data for valuable information.